Sermon by Pastor Brent Kompelien
December 17, 2023
INTRO
Good morning! Welcome to the 3rd week of Advent, a season where we look ahead to the celebration of Christmas and remember the incredible reality of the incarnation of Jesus Christ.
This dawning of the Light of the World, the Word made Flesh, and manifestation of the Living God as a babe in a manger in a stable in Bethlehem is a most extraordinary truth. There is nothing that compares in all the world, nothing that compares in all history, nothing that compares in any other worldview.
You see, our text this morning is going to remind us of the power of the gospel, the glory of what God has done for us, and the oneness we have in Christ as a witness to the world.
I want to begin this morning by pondering the uniqueness the incarnation, the beauty of God coming to us, the profound work of redemption that has been achieved through Jesus Christ.
ILLUST — Consider this thought from an apologetics book I read recently: “Every major world religion gives people a ladder to climb to God — rules, guidelines, laws, stipulations…Christianity is the only world religion in which God comes down to man.”
This is the most radical and glorious reality. Listen friends, we cannot reach God on our own merit or our own strength. Our hearts are impoverished, our merit woefully inadequate, our lives tainted with the curse of sin top-to-bottom. What are we to do about it? This is the most fundamental question, and many people seek answers in various religions, worldviews, pleasures, achievements, or substances that will never satisfy.
This book goes on to describe the fundamental difference between other worldviews and the Christian faith. Listen to what this author writes: “Other religions say, ‘Here is the ladder: climb up it.’ The surprising grace of the gospel says, ‘God climbed down the ladder for us.’ Other worldviews say, ‘Here is the way to walk, you can do it.’ Jesus said, ‘I am the way, take up your cross and follow me.’ Other religions say, ‘Here is how you can be lifted up to God.’ Jesus said, ‘I will be lifted up on the cross for you.’…The great I AM became what we are so that we could become children of God.”
Wow! This most profound truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ is the center of our faith; we place our hope in him and what he has done for us. It all starts at the incarnation, the joining of God and man, the light shining in the darkness, or as John put it: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14)
In our text for this morning, John 17, Jesus prays that his followers would be unified in the message of the gospel, finding our oneness in him, and showing the world the glory of Christ and the love of God by our love for one another and our steadfastness in proclaiming Christ.
Let’s read our text this morning. READ John 17:20-26.
ORG SENT — The central theme of this prayer is this: (SLIDE 2a) Oneness for witness. As Jesus prays for oneness, or unity, for the coming generations of his followers, he makes clear three aspects of this unity: (SLIDE 2b) Jesus reveals the substance of our unity, (SLIDE 2c) he reveals the source of our unity, (SLIDE 2d) and he reveals the purpose of our unity. That’s how we are going to tackle this passage today, looking at the substance of our unity, the source of our unity, and the purpose of our unity as Christ’s followers.
MAIN 1 — Substance of our Unity. (SLIDE 3a)
Go to the text with me, back to the start of this section of Jesus’ prayer. READ v. 20-21.
Here we see a critical truth about what it means to be a Christian: (SLIDE 3b) We are a people of the Word, who have a message, who are entrusted with the true vision of the world and the true reality of who God is, who we are, what God has done for us in Christ, and where this world is headed. In other words, we aren’t confused about who made us, what our reason for existence is, how to be redeemed from sin, and how history will end.
ILLUST — The great Reformer John Calvin once said that the primary organ of the Christian is our ears, for we are ones who receive the Word about Christ and must close our mouths and stop trying to earn God’s favor with our hands in order to listen to the message of the gospel of grace and to receive it as a gift.
I’d also add that the feet and the mouths of Christians are just as important. We not only are recipients of the message of Christ, but we are called to be heralds, messengers, and proclaimers of this message, and we need to get our feet moving and go the ends of the earth to tell others!
Remember last week we heard from Paul in Romans 10:13 say, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” This is how he continues in the very next verse: (SLIDE 4) “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”
We are entrusted with the gospel in our generation, ones who have tasted the grace of God and are called to proclaim the grace of God to others. ILLUST — One of my mentors in the faith put it this way: “We are all beggars telling other beggars where to find bread.”
(SLIDE 5, blank) Sometimes we forget this most simple reality. A prime example in the Bible is the Corinthian church. The early believers in Corinth forgot that they had received a message of grace centered on Christ, they had gotten their eye off the ball and the church descended into factions and popularity contests.
ILLUST — Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:11-12, “My brothers and sisters, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is this: One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.”
This is what he says next in 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 — (SLIDE 6) “I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”
APPLY: I want to make this very clear. Our unity is not found by seeking the lowest theological denominator, or by following a certain preacher, or by seeking to adapt our theology to the culture, or by being flashy or edgy, or by adding legalistic rules and methods to control behavior. Our unity is found in this simple and most profound truth: Jesus Christ and him crucified.
This is the grounds of our unity. This is “the message” passed along from the original disciples. In other words, our unity has substance. It is not merely touchy-feely. It is not dependent on any human eloquence. It is not about us and our preferences. Rather, our oneness is grounded in the biblical message of the gospel, it is grounded in the person of Jesus Christ and the real work he has done for us in his life, death, and resurrection!
We have real unity in Him. And this stems from an overflow of the oneness of Jesus with the Father. So, let’s look at the source of our unity.
MAIN 2 — Source of our Unity. (SLIDE 7a)
Pick it up in verse 21. READ v. 21.
This same language is repeated through this text. Jesus continually refers to the oneness of God the Father and God the Son. In the eternal Trinity, there is oneness of purpose, oneness of love, oneness of being, oneness of attributes and character, and oneness of redemptive work as the Father sends, the Son achieves, and the Spirit applies salvation by grace through faith.
In other words, the oneness that we are called to in the church is not something that stands on its own or was invented by God or is something humans can create. It is a unity that is derivative from God himself. (SLIDE 7b) Our oneness is a reflection of God. We can only find true oneness in the church when we truly abide in oneness with the Father through the Son, the True Vine. Remember John 15?
The Father is the gardener, the Son is the Vine, and we are the branches who are connected to Jesus, our source of life and our security in every season and in every aspect of our being. We must grasp this most fundamental reality: We will never have unity in the church without being united to Christ. (SLIDE 7c) Our oneness together comes from our oneness with the Father through the Son.
KEY: Finding the source of our unity in the oneness of Father and Son has an important dimension that Jesus highlights in this prayer: He prays that we would see be brought into unity together to his glory. (SLIDE 7d) READ vv. 22-24.
Remember from two weeks ago, we defined the word glory as “splendor”. Jesus has revealed the splendor of the Father to us through his life, death, and resurrection.
Cf. 1 John 3:1-2, “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”
This is our ultimate hope: That we will not only see the glory of Christ in his earthly ministry, but that we have a future secure in the new heavens and new earth to know the glory of Jesus unveiled, unmitigated, unclouded by our frail and sinful flesh. This is why Jesus prays in verse 24 that we would be brought to our heavenly home to know his glory.
ILLUST — New Testament scholar Don Carson described this future heavenly hope this way: “The glory of Christ that his followers will see is his glory as God, the glory he enjoyed before his mission because of the Father’s love for him. The ultimate hope of Jesus’ followers thus turns on the love of the Father for the Son.”
Friends, do you grasp the unbelievable reality that we are welcomed into the union of Father and Son, welcomed and adopted as blood-bought children of God, co-heirs with Christ, secure and loved. Wow!
ILLUST — Don Carson goes on to say: “This thought is breathtakingly extravagant…Christians themselves have been caught up into the love of the Father for the Son, secure and content and fulfilled because they are loved by the Almighty himself with the very same love he reserves for his Son. It is hard to imagine a more compelling evangelistic appeal!”
This is where we get to the last part of our oneness as believers: there is a purpose.
MAIN 3 — Purpose of our Unity. (SLIDE 8a)
If you didn’t notice earlier, Jesus mentions “the world” multiple times in this passage. (SLIDE 8b) READ vv. 21b, 23b, 25.
There are purpose statements here. There is sense of mission or purpose for our unity in the church as we embody the substance of the gospel and reflect the source of our oneness in the Father and Son.
(SLIDE 8c) The purpose is simple: So that the world may believe, so that the world may know.
In other words, our oneness is to be so compelling, so other-worldly, that our witness should point to reality that God is near, that God can be known, that God can be trusted and followed and obeyed.
This is what we celebrate at Christmas: Jesus is Immanuel, God With Us. He is the ultimate fulfillment of the biblical promise that God would dwell with his people.
You see, Jesus is the great revealer of the presence of God, the great revealer of the truth of God, and the great revealer of the salvation of God. He is the one through whom we come to know the love of God in flesh and blood, in a public display of God’s promise fulfilled to his people, in paying the ultimate price to pay for our sin and defeat evil and death forever.
APPLY: When we grasp the depths of what God has done through Christ in our redemption, we take our oneness to a whole different level. I want to challenge you to consider this, especially as we talk about our oneness as witness: Sometimes we can mistake harmony or conformity for unity (SLIDE 8d). Unity is not harmony or conformity.
Harmony is a state of tranquility, a lack of conflict, a social arrangement where we don’t publicly show any signs of weakness or relational strife. Many of us try to have harmony with difficult friends, or harmony at work, or harmony during awkward holiday gathering with our family. And sadly, some churches try to force harmony in order to hide failures or conflict. But unity is different.
Conformity is an attempt to coerce outward alignment on beliefs, behavior, or methods. This is often achieved through control, manipulation, or shaming. It is more about image-management and eliminating those who disagree.
Unity, as Jesus prays here, is much deeper. It is a sense of being united on the solid ground of the substance of the gospel. It is a sense of being united on the source of who is our Lord and who is really exercising sovereign control of our circumstance. It is a sense of being united in purpose to bring the gospel message to a lost and broken world.
Unity doesn’t mean we will always agree on personal preferences or that we will never get on each other’s nerves or that we will never make mistakes. But unity does mean that we will always choose to bear with one another in love, knowing how much we have been loved, undeservingly, by our Heavenly Father through Christ Jesus. Jesus came full of grace and full of truth. We exercise grace with each other and stand in the truth together.
KEY: (SLIDE 8e) We are the objects of God’s love through Christ Jesus in a transformative way so that we practice God’s own love as a witness to the world.
In other words, we cannot afford to practice a merely superficial harmony or outward conformity because neither of these come close to comparing to the depths of God’s radical, self-giving, and transformational love that he has shown us in Christ!
Rather, we will practice real oneness, real unity, only when we grasp the desperate state of our sin and our need for a Savior. It only comes when we open our hands to receive God’s unmerited grace and full forgiveness. It only comes when we abide in Christ, resting in the presence of the Spirit, holding firm to the true message of the gospel, passed along to us through the Holy Scriptures, ready to show the watching world what true sacrificial love looks like as we walk by faith side-by-side.